You code won't work with many servers as they require a Host: header.

sub socket_get {
    my ( $url, $cookies ) = @_;

  return ("HTTP/1.0 500 Invalid URL $url", '' )
        unless $url =~ m!^http://([^/:\@]+)(?::(\d+))?(/\S*)?$!;
    my $host = $1;
    my $port = $2 || 80;
    my $path = $3;
    $path = "/" unless defined $path;

    require IO::Socket::INET;
    my $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(
        PeerAddr => $host,
        Proto => 'tcp',
        PeerPort => $port,
    )   or return ( "HTTP/1.0 500 Could not connect socket: $url", '' 
+);

    $sock->autoflush;
    my $netloc = $host;
    $netloc .= ":$port" if $port != 80;

    my $cookie_str = '';
    if ( $cookies and ref($cookies) eq 'ARRAY' ) {
         $cookie_str .= "Cookie: $_\015\012" for @$cookies;
    }

    my $req = join '', "GET $path HTTP/1.0\015\012",
                "Host: $netloc\015\012",
                "Accept: */*\015\012",
                "Accept-Encoding: *\015\012",
                $cookie_str,
                "User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Window
+s 98; )\015\012\015\012";

    syswrite( $sock, $req );

    my ($header, $content, $buffer) = ('','','');
    $content .= $buffer while sysread( $sock, $buffer, 8192 );

    $sock->close;

  return ( "HTTP/1.0 500 Failed to get any content for $url", '' ) unl
+ess $content;

    ( $header, $content ) = split /\015\012\015\012|\012\012|\015\015/
+, $content, 2;

  return ( "HTTP/1.0 500 Failed to get a header for $url", '' ) unless
+ $header;

    # unfold the header
    $header =~ s/\015\012/\n/g;
    $header =~ s/\n\s+/ /g;
    $content ||= '';
  return ( $header, $content );
}
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